codybmusser

Try my best. Sometimes it is harder than it should be!

From the article:

"Content Farms like Demand Media are worth more than the New York Times, producing over a million low-quality articles for popular searches. Other sites quickly copy published content, flooding search results with just a few extremely similar pages. When I Google: “How much is spent on SEO every year?”, 8 of the top 10 results are a conversation with someone named Jack – and no answers. As Paul Kedrosky puts it, “Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. …Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility.”

Most of what we do online to make decisions – searching for data, seeking to understand what it means, and then understanding what’s important to us – has already been done by someone else who’d like to share their research. And, if it was available to you, you wouldn’t mind making that research a bit better. We just need the tools."

Am I too much a video game nerd if my first thought was, a new Final Fantasy?

This was the best of the talks at TEDxCMU.

I'd like to hear more about this. I was under the impression that student loan debt couldn't be relieved due to bankruptcy and there weren't any options like this.

It sounds like a free pass, and that makes me think this isn't any longer true. My search for a solution was always relegated to seeking out a way to change loan terms or consolidate so that I was paying less over a longer time.

At 40% of my income to student loans for a period of 20 years, I expect I won't be able to save any income or afford to have a child until I'm... eh, 45 or so. If there's actually a free pass, I'd take it.

It's nice to see so many positive comments. I made a similar thread about dealing with $70k (and being in the relatively low income marketing/PR field) on Reddit a few months back and was greeted with a lot of:

"Your stupid fault." "Should have done your research in choosing majors." "You brought it on yourself."

I understand the opinions, but that didn't add much to the conversation, nor help me to understand if there was something I might have been missing out on.

Some notes on what I did figure out would be:

- Loan agents will downright lie. Always do the math yourself. I called SM to explain I needed my payment below $200 and we worked together to make it $185. A month later they my bill came in and my payment was $240. The story was that some of the many small loans weren't included in a new payment plan and blah blah blah...

- The advice to pursue income based repayment is great, but many private lenders (which you no doubt have at with over $100k in debt) will simply say no. Working with private loans is a world different than working with public loans.

- Find out if any of your loans have an interest rate more than twice that of other ones (mine surely do). Request a deferment or forebearance on any loans with an interest rate of 4%, and pay all that extra on your loans at 18%.

- Umm... there's no easy way out to give up work and create a company. Sorry. I looked and looked myself. You likely won't be able to afford starting a company, but you can try to supplement your income with contracting or small 'muse' projects if you have the motivation.

- Don't expect help from the government. The new 'student loan reform' helps them far more dramatically than it helps you: http://i.imgur.com/vJm22.jpg

I pay around $800 a month in student loans on a $2000 monthly income. So, 40% of all my money. Welcome to the good life.